A weblog on nature and place, the design arts, critters, and baseball...

Who We Are

Numenius is a geographer by training and temperament. He is a Bay Area native, and grew up roaming the East Bay hills. Pica takes her cue from Pica nuttalli, the endemic magpie of central California, chatty and alighting on gleaming things. Pica has another blog, Bird by Bird, in which she records her sketches of birds.

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17 September 07

Avian Anatomy

My recent forays into bird sketching have required the study of some elementary avian anatomy. Where to find such a tome? I looked at online sources and pretty quickly realized I had a very respectable book on our shelves already, Proctor and Lynch’s Manual of Ornithology, a book I imagine the entering Avian Sciences class at Davis will be purchasing. (I got my copy back when I worked for an east-coast university press and knew the sales rep for a different east-coast university press.)

It’s been years since I did any anatomy at all, but it’s good to see some familiar names (humerus, ulna, radius) and some less familiar ones (retrices, hallux, crissum). I do already know about supercilia and malar patches.

My protracted encounter with turkey vultures today made me realize how much an anatomical background might help as I try to sort out feather groups, structure, shape…